The Archive

Methods for analyzing and visualizing literary data receive substantially more attention in digital literary studies than the digital archives with which literary data are predominantly constructed. When discussed, digital archives are often perceived as entirely different from nondigital ones, and as passive – that is, as novel and enabling (or disabling) settings or backgrounds for research rather than active shapers of literary knowledge. This understanding produces abstract critiques of digital archives, and risks conflating events and trends in the histories of literary data with events and trends in literary history. By contrast, an emerging group of media-specific approaches adapt traditional philological and media archaeological methods to explore the complex and interdependent relationship between literary knowledges, technologies, and infrastructures.